Tagging is a neglected cause area. There is still a huge amount to do, and tagging makes a real difference in making LessWrong content easier to discover, explore, and re-find.
The problem is real. People find LessWrong difficult to read because it is full of deep inferential distances and special jargon. Tags offer an easy way to disambiguate jargon, and reference all the relevant material on a subject.
Tagging isn’t just altruistic. Want to promote an idea/topic? Tagging posts and writing a good tag description is a great way to make that topic easier to discover and explore. If writing blobs of text which lots of people later read pumps your ego, tagging is a good way to do that. Write that tag before someone else! But it’s also useful—not just to other people, but also, to yourself. Tagging posts on subjects you love, and upvoting the tag on the most relevant ones, will make it easier for you to reference them later.
You will probably discover things you want to read. Tagging naturally gets you searching for content on LessWrong related to your favorite topics. You are likely to discover than more has been written on these topics than you previously realized.
Tagging is easy. Whenever you think of a tag you want to exist (usually because you’re reading a post and decide to tag it with something, only to discover the tag doesn’t exist yet), just do a search for that thing on LessWrong and tag all the relevant results! There are other approaches, of course, but if everyone did this, then we’d be in a pretty good position: any new tag created would already be put on most of the relevant posts. (This strategy doesn’t work for tags which cover a significant portion of the content on LessWrong, such as the core tags, of course.)
If you’re not sure what to tag, take a look at the top posts without tags. You may want to familiarize yourself with the core tags and the concepts portal, so that you’re not missing some obvious ones when you tag things.
PSA: Tagging is Awesome
I’d like to supplement the open call for taggers with a few points:
Tagging is a neglected cause area. There is still a huge amount to do, and tagging makes a real difference in making LessWrong content easier to discover, explore, and re-find.
The problem is real. People find LessWrong difficult to read because it is full of deep inferential distances and special jargon. Tags offer an easy way to disambiguate jargon, and reference all the relevant material on a subject.
Tagging isn’t just altruistic. Want to promote an idea/topic? Tagging posts and writing a good tag description is a great way to make that topic easier to discover and explore. If writing blobs of text which lots of people later read pumps your ego, tagging is a good way to do that. Write that tag before someone else! But it’s also useful—not just to other people, but also, to yourself. Tagging posts on subjects you love, and upvoting the tag on the most relevant ones, will make it easier for you to reference them later.
You will probably discover things you want to read. Tagging naturally gets you searching for content on LessWrong related to your favorite topics. You are likely to discover than more has been written on these topics than you previously realized.
Tagging is easy. Whenever you think of a tag you want to exist (usually because you’re reading a post and decide to tag it with something, only to discover the tag doesn’t exist yet), just do a search for that thing on LessWrong and tag all the relevant results! There are other approaches, of course, but if everyone did this, then we’d be in a pretty good position: any new tag created would already be put on most of the relevant posts. (This strategy doesn’t work for tags which cover a significant portion of the content on LessWrong, such as the core tags, of course.)
If you’re not sure what to tag, take a look at the top posts without tags. You may want to familiarize yourself with the core tags and the concepts portal, so that you’re not missing some obvious ones when you tag things.